23 Responses

I like the idea of getting resources from nullified enemies more
the breeder difference is cool, does it working with anti creeper by default? can you set it to?
trees are nice, does AC destroy them?
upgrades look nice, I like the ern zone and the strategic choices it opens up
orbital stuff looks nice

Aww man, power zones not only coming back but buildable, that’s the best news in a while! Looking forward to seeing what they do on the various units. They’re of course awesome on mortars, but it’d be cool if other options are sometimes good in niche situations. Like towers, nullifiers, snipers/missiles (which are pretty much the same, couldn’t they and their respective targets be consolidated?), even the occasional collector/reactor.

By the way, the YouTube text link above the embedded video seems to be broken in two, with the first half linking to the previous video.

Yes the AE, Air Exclusion, towers were what blocked air & orbital bombardment (and stopped guppies from landing). I think a return of the AE towers will be needed as well as perhaps an option to have emitters either have their own “shield” which of course would be toggle-able when making the map or even have some sort of ‘dampening’ effect on your airstrikes and bombardment around them.

Life! A fascinating addition. Doodads and whatnot will allow for some unique-looking custom maps. And speaking of which…it might be cool to have a “save the budding life forms” mission objective, by having CRPL check for the existence of those doodads. If they get wiped out, game over. To that end I’d like to ask for CRPL controls over these doodads. “Get”ting and “Set”ting would be powerful tools, and greatly appreciated.
Great work as always, it makes my day to see these updates, knowing that things are still coming along nicely.

I really like the Damper call-down and I think it is perhaps the most powerful of the three 1 cost ones (I would say that nothing could compare to a well timed conversion bomb and that is just how it has always worked in CW2 & CW3). The possibilities of using the Damper to push down an emitter or other enemy, taking strategic places like hills, controlling waves etc make it exceptionally powerful. I think of the four current call-down’s that might need the most consideration regarding balance. Looking great though I do have to say the rocket launch seems a little out of place. Maybe something a bit more high tech feeling? I know this is a different setting than the other games but even the first was way beyond conventional rockets (unless there is some other crazy reason we can’t just use the same type of hover-engine-things weapons & the command structure use).

I notice the much more powerful options for Porters compared to Guppies in CW3…much appreciated—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to launch a Guppy half-full…

Regarding the tech system—do you have any provision in mind for further levels of each tech? I find Particle Fleet’s tech system (which this is obviously based on) a bit disappointing late-game because there’s no way to get the POWER OVERWHELMING feel you can get with 5/5/5 weapons, 10/10 build/packet speed, etc. in CW3. Maybe make it possible to assign additional ERNs to a docking site, with either a slightly reduced effect or a longer ramp time (so that each level effectively “costs” more, like in CW3)? Or, perhaps some way to spend a tier-2 mined resource to boost the effect of a particular ERN docking site—effectively allowing it to go above “100%” effectiveness?

And, one feature request I’ve been meaning to make for a while—not related to this video in any way: Replays! I’ve many times finished a CW3 mission and thought to myself, “man, I wish I could see what that looks like in real-time, without all the pausing”. And of course it would be cool if, when someone asks a speedrunner “how…?!?!?!”, they could respond with a replay—if they so choose.

Building on this, it could make sense to be able to take a replay and “step in” at some point, turning it into a live game—mostly for learning/exploration purposes, but I must say it would be nice, when I make a dumb mistake without a recent save, not to have to manually re-play a big chunk of the mission.

I agree that a replay feature would be very cool. However, I worry that the ability to “step in” might be too demanding. Such a feature would mean the game has to save very often, which, depending in the complexity of the map, can itself take a while, not to mention the amount of memory that would take. So, I think for now you’ll just have to save more often.

Re: needing to save very often—I’m thinking of a replay that is implemented as a recording of user input which is then played back to the game engine to recreate the game. So, stepping in would be as simple as pausing and handing over control from the saved input to the actual player—there wouldn’t have to be a “save” at that point in order to do it. The disadvantage of this approach is that the replay can only be played from the beginning—though perhaps the game *could* make occasional saves and associate them with their corresponding timestamp in the replay, creating “keyframes” that could be used to jump into the middle.

I still think we need a smooth effect on the creeper. The sharp spikes still feel pretty wrong. It doesn’t look quite as much like a liquid as it ought to, even if this is just a 3d varient of roughly what it looked like in 2d.

There were a few ideas I came up with, but most have problems. The most important being that any solution MUST only modify the graphics.

Apply a smooth effect to the mesh, possiby by having more vertexes(I think thats the word) and make it more curved. Spikes would have more rounded tops at the least.

Scale to neighbors, so it would be taller or shorter based on adjacent cells. Spikes would be shorter, and the surroundings taller.
May be preferable to only scale upwards, so that tall waves that can roll over hills won’t shrink and then roll over when they visually shouldn’t.

Past that, The gravity spike, should also apply a graphical effect, such that it appears massively shorter, The mechanic is great in 2d since you can’t see it acting like a Cylindrical field, but it looks weird in 3d. Having it end up in a short bulge with very shallow creeper around it which, on the field ending explodes in all directions INCLUDING (Visually) upwards, would be far more satisfying.

All of these different resource types seem kind of unexciting to me… it feels like it’ll be a chore for me to keep on top of all the different kinds of resources, in addition to keeping on top of the battle. Every time I want to build something and have a surplus of the wrong kind of resource, I won’t be thinking “what an awesome game”, I’ll be thinking “oh that’s an irritating detail – I want to focus on being a military tactician rather than a quartermaster”.

It would be cool to have support in 4rpl and modding for adding in things like trees, and then having a ‘trigger’ for successfully protecting the trees, or town, tech facility, temple, or whatever. (or failing to)